Lisa Kirchner - Biography
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Jack Price Founding Partner / Managing Director Marc Parella Partner / Director of Operations Mailing Address: 520 Geary Street Suite 605 San Francisco CA 94102 Telephone: Toll-Free 1-866-PRI-RUBI (774-7824) 310-254-7149 / Los Angeles 415-504-3654 / San Francisco Email: [email protected] [email protected] Website: http://www.pricerubin.com Yahoo!Messenger pricerubin Contents: Biography Reviews Lisa Kirchner - Biography Lisa Kirchner is a singer of remarkable versatility, a singer, songwriter and actress who performs an eclectic, multi-lingual repertoire that includes jazz standards from The Great American Songbook, French and Brazilian classics, folk, theatre and contemporary American and European art songs . "My father, a contemporary classical composer, conductor and pianist, took me to see Ray Charles, played and analyzed Duke Ellington songs with me, and pointed out the brilliance of a young guitarist named Jimi Hendrix, as we discussed Mozart, Bach and Schoenberg. My mother was a coloratura soprano who had performed classical lieder and show tunes in New York supper clubs”. Lisa’s musical journey has led her from classical piano, operetta and folk songs to cabaret and musical theatre on and off Broadway to a brand of ambient jazz as eclectic as her musical influences. Lisa Kirchner has appeared at venues including Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, Ryles Jazz Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Iridium, Birdland, and The Village Gate in New York City as well as many other clubs on the jazz and cabaret circuit. The invited singer to Gracie Mansion, she has performed at the White House, at Harvard University and the Harvard Club. Lisa's entree into the jazz venue is preceded by her years of experience in theatre and television. She wrote her own songs for her on camera appearances on NBC's Another World. Her varied performance background has included Broadway appearances in lead and featured roles in the New York Shakespeare Festival productions of The Threepenny Opera, and Galt MacDermot's The Human Comedy. Off-Broadway, Kirchner originated the role of Irma Vep in Richard Foreman and Stanley Silverman's Hotel For Criminals and it's sequel, The American Imagination. She has been featured in numerous off and off-off Broadway productions at the Public Theatre, the Delacorte Theatre, La Mama Theatre and annex, Westbeth and The American Place Theatre. On television she appeared as Undine Spragg in the BRAVO Cable channel's Songs from the Heart, and as a ballad singer in Out of Our Father's House, on WNET's Great Performances. As a dancer she appeared in Grover Dale's Houdini, and with the James Waring Dance Company she appeared at Judson Memorial Church. Lisa Kirchner was Judy Collins' featured soloist at Carnegie Hall and sang harmony vocals with Collins. Lisa Kirchner’s solo vocal albums, One More Rhyme (2000), When Lights Are Low ( 2002), In the Shadow of a Crow (2009) and Something to Sing About (2011) on Albany Records have garnered critical and professional praise (delete period) noting her intuitive musicality, eloquent phrasing, and a unique and beautiful sound. Lisa has consistently sought out the creative and improvisational gift of outstanding performers with whom she collaborates to interpret her eclectic repertoire. Lisa Kirchner has additionally produced four albums on Albany Records, featuring the music of her father, renowned composer, Leon Kirchner: Leon Kirchner Piano Works (2006), Leon Kirchner Complete String Quartets/The Orion String Quartet (2008) , Concert: Leon Kirchner Chamber Works, (2009) and Leon Kirchner Orchestral Works (2011) Lisa Kirchner – Reviews Scan the covers of Lisa Kirchner’s six albums to date and the first thing you’ll note is that her flame- colored hair grows increasingly untamed. So, too, has her musicality grown steadily bolder and wilder. Serving up her first platter of all-original material , the dusky-voiced Kirchner reaches a new apex, pairing poetry as densely atmospheric as Mitchell’s or Waits’ with melodies that reflect her longstanding cosmopolitan flair, and melding influences as varied as Brel, Brecht, Weill, Gershwin, Becker and Fagen. Kirchner opens with “Salty and Blue (I Don’t Believe in Romance),” a sassy dismissal of moon-June songwriting tropes that sets the stage for the wide-ranging imaginativeness to follow. The dark, stormy percolation of “A Billion Stars Ago (In the Shadow of a Crow)” makes way for the chanson delicacy of “What About You?,” as misty-eyed paean to Paris which sighs and steps aside for the globetrotting “The Hudson Bay Inn,” a jaunty jumble of images worthy of Lorraine Feather. The spirited title track sketches Kirchner’s quest for an equally madcap paramour, while the twirling “Tim” recalls a vividly mottled past relationship. Her border-blurring travels continue through “Under the Paris Moon,” while the closing “Quarters and Dimes” provides a sprightly summation of her narrative panache. All in all, Umbrellas is an exhilarating crazy quilt. Jeff Tamarkin/Jazz Times Every song in Lisa Kirchner’s album, Umbrellas in Mint, is worth your attention and time. Ms. Kirchner not only has a beautiful voice, but she is a master poet with a musical gift. I thank her for including in her liner notes all the words to all the songs, and I recommend that you listen and follow along as I did. - Carl Reiner Lisa Kirchner is her great father's daughter in talent and originality. She never takes the expected or easy way, and her songs reflect the joys and agonies of her life's experiences. Listen, and you will be won over. You may even hear a hint of Leon-- a truly haunting shadow of his smile! - Paul Chihara Umbrellas in Mint," Lisa Kirchner's new CD, is the most exciting album Ms. Kirchner has yet to produce. She is in beautiful voice, the shimmering, delicious lines of her vocals are here in abundance, giving the listener shivers of pure pleasure; and the songs! Her writing continues to flourish, as a garden of lyric beauty. What a singer! and what a CD! I am impressed, as I always have been, by Lisa Kirchner's talent and her continuing success as a singer, writer and performer – Judy Collins Lisa Kirchner's songs in Umbrellas In Mint are pure poetry...There are singer- songwriters aplenty, good ones and some not so good. Lisa Kirchner isn't good. Lisa Kirchner is great. The woman is a poet. Her lyrics demand attention, and the fact that she sets them in a variety of elegant melodies puts her in the same class with the best of the singer/poets. And besides that, she can sing. Her voice has the kind of classic purity that does full justice to her remarkable lyrics…This is a unique voice… - Jack Goodstein/BCMusic Premium …Every song here was in fact written by the wild-maned Kirchner and, for me, brings back tangs of the underlauded Robert Kraft, among others, as the Carmichaelish What About You? (LOVE that "A ceiling at midnight, where stars shine on cue" line!) demonstrates. A wide palette of world influences invade the entire cycle here, subordinated beautifully to the dominantly Broadway ambiance...Expect generous doses of Rogers & Hart, Brel, Hammerstein, and a bunch of others in the Songbook milieu, but there are also a number of surprisingly Brechtian tinges, as Kirchner's unafraid of the shadows populating boulevards and hearts. She knows those darksome dimensions are just wellsprings… Umbrellas is an exhilarating escapade, a collection of songs wrought for a stage musical yet to be put beneath the lights... - Mark S. Tucker/Folk & Acoustic Music Exchange Drawing from jazz, Broadway, cabaret and Great American Songbook influences, Kirchner presents a dozen outstanding originals. They're rich in diversity, imagery and emotion. "Under The Paris Moon" and '"Southern Starlight" are especially enchanting. "A Billion Stars Ago (In The Shadow of a Crow)" is intricately designed and intriguingly performed. Kirchner's elegantly expressive voice caresses her well-crafted lyrics and delicately woven melodies. - Paul Freeman/PopCultureClassics.Com If it can be said that anyone has music in her D.N.A., that person would be Lisa Kirchner… An album of all original material, Umbrellas in Mint is full of story-songs that might be taken from a progressive Broadway show, the melodies strong and the lyrics full of emotion. Ms. Kirchner sings in a way that draws the listener in, making us hang on her phrasing to see where the story - or the musical composition - will go next. While so many jazz singers are content to recycle the Great American Song Book, she is staking out new ground. -Jeffrey Siegel/Straight No Chaser In this her sixth album, jazz stylist Lisa Kirchner pushes the boundaries of her inestimable talents as a singer and arranger... She has written both the music and the lyrics for this highly imaginative exploration into poetry and stage plays and invites us on a journey called UMBRELLAS IN MINT - a story like no other and one that likely other singers will add to their repertoire... that is how strong this music is....Kirchner is such a brilliant stylist that she is able to take us on a surreal flight of fancy about love and life in Manhattan....This is excellent music -Grady Harp/Amazon.com Kirchner's latest finds her really comfortable in her own skin and really hitting it out of the park…Killer stuff. - Chris Spector/Editor Publisher …can't be surpassed by most in the jazz arena today! -Rotcod Zzaj - Improvijazzation Nation Style, elegance, impeccable musicality, chanteuse extraordinaire - they all apply to the amazing Lisa Kirchner. For this listener this is her strongest album to date - more variation, more variety of accompaniment, more pizzazz, more tenderness.